THE POISON GARDEN website

Pontifications on Poison

Being some ramblings on events associated with poisonous plants.

Wednesday 8th February 2012

Something strange is going on in the world of addiction
medicine. I can’t explain it so I’ll have to restrict myself to
reporting it.

Reports from Mexico, originally picked up by Spanish language
media in the USA and then appearing in English, say that the
government’s National Institute of Psychiatry has patented a
vaccine against heroin.

Both stories say that Mexico's Health Secretary Salomon
Chertorivski had announced that the Government had patented the
treatment after successfully testing it on addicted rats. His
announcement came during a visit to the border town Ciudad
Juarez, an area that, according to Diego Valle
http://www.diegovalle.net/drug-war-map.html saw 2,738 drug
related homicides in 2010. I mention that because Mexico is
heading towards presidential elections so, I think, you have to
be sensitive to the possibility that the announcement was
intended to offer hope that the horror that is life on the
Mexican/American border may have a happy ending.

The timing is, certainly, of interest. In April 2006, the
journal vaccine contained a paper from researchers at Mexico’s
National Institute of Psychiatry entitled
‘A novel bivalent morphine/heroin vaccine that prevents relapse
to heroin addiction in rodents’ and it is, presumably, that
work to which the Minister referred. I’ve haven’t seen any more
recent published work on the topic but I did find
the full patent documentation. This says the patent was
filed in July 2005 and published on 30th August 2011. Why has it
taken from the end of August until February for this achievement
to be touted? The reports say his visit was part of the launch
of a technology transfer programme with the USA so, perhaps, he
wanted to show that the flow of discovery is not, exclusively,
north to south.

There’s an interesting difference between Fox News and the
Daily Mail as to the significance of the story. The former
reports the Minister as saying ‘Before human testing can be done
though, there must be another five years of work on the vaccine’
whereas the Daily Mail states ‘A vaccine against heroin
addiction could be ready for human use in just five years’.

It is often said that morphine was isolated from opium by
scientists looking for a treatment for opium addiction. Though
that is almost certainly not the case, it is true that, when
morphine was being viewed as a panacea, there were those who
promoted its use to treat addiction. It does seem that the
discovery of diacetylmorphine was made by a London chemist, C.
R. Alder Wright, who was searching for a cure for morphine
addiction but, again, it is not clear whether he believed this
was a cure or was simply an incidental discovery. Certainly,
when the Bayer Laboratories developed Alder Wright’s work and
patented ‘Heroin’ it was as an analgesic rather than an
addiction treatment.

I’ve even heard it suggested that cocaine was first extracted
from the leaves of
Erythroxylum coca as a cure for morphinism but, again, it
seems that its use for that purpose commenced after its
discovery and did not drive the discovery process.

It’s common to think that we are much more knowledgeable than
our ancestors and that we no longer make the foolish mistakes
they made by failing to understand enough about how things work.
I certainly hope that Mexico’s researchers are giving due
consideration to what unexpected consequences there might be as
a result of altering the brain’s functions to make it suppress
addictive cravings.